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Author
Topic: Is it safe to take curcumin (Tumeric)? (Read 12665 times)

Hiafter reading that ''early aging'' article, I got a little worried, so I think I should update my list of supplements. My doctor is against taking anything w/HAART (Kaletra+Kivexa), but he's said omega3 & selenium are ok. I think I will start taking vitamin E, vitamin D and calcium.

As for dementia prevention, aside from omega3, there's curcumin.I've seen curcumin supplements here and I wonder if I can take them.

What worries me a bit is curcumin's impact on HIV, I've read it blocks HIV replication, but

1. this may be desirable in people who are not on HAART

2. this may not be good in people on HAART (drugs eliminate replicating virus, but cannot do anything to a dormant/latent virus; therefore new drugs will be developed for HIV''activation'', like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostratin , curcumin may be doing the opposite)

If at some future point we have a medicine that can eradicate HIV it will likely come with it's own list of interactions. But it seems pretty unlikely that eating from the spice rack in the mean time will hurt you.

Regarding the study though... Basically they injected rats with a HIV peptide to damage them, then injected them with turmeric and claimed it helped avoid the harm the peptide would otherwise have caused. This seems a very long ways from demonstrating efficacy in humans.

Pubmed is just a library. The fact that an article is in pubmed does not mean it is necessarily a good or useful one.

I have been taking tumeric for about four years. I started after I read the first article iterating what you've stated. However, I'm on Sustiva, Epivir, Ziagen.

At one point I mentioned it to my PA who was in a huff about risking it... until I added that I'd been taking it for the past three years! At that point she agreed it obviously isn't hurting my results with meds since I was undetectable the entire time.

Because we're on two of the same meds, perhaps you now just need to determine how it might interact with your PI.

Hiafter reading that ''early aging'' article, I got a little worried, so I think I should update my list of supplements. My doctor is against taking anything w/HAART (Kaletra+Kivexa), but he's said omega3 & selenium are ok. I think I will start taking vitamin E, vitamin D and calcium.

As for dementia prevention, aside from omega3, there's curcumin.I've seen curcumin supplements here and I wonder if I can take them.

What worries me a bit is curcumin's impact on HIV, I've read it blocks HIV replication, but

1. this may be desirable in people who are not on HAART

2. this may not be good in people on HAART (drugs eliminate replicating virus, but cannot do anything to a dormant/latent virus; therefore new drugs will be developed for HIV''activation'', like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostratin , curcumin may be doing the opposite)

After being infected 11 months ago i have read alot about vitamin supps and various foods and i have come to the conclusion that all we need to take are vitamin d and calcium ,selenium( if you have Low levels) and omega 3. I was tested yesterday for vit d ,calcium and selenium and testorone ,get results next week. If my levels are ok i wont take anything eccept omega 3 which i have been taking for four years already . A good multi vit with minerals wont do you any harm but if you eat a good healthy balanced diet you dont need them.

I'm definitely enthusiastic about turmeric! But for me, the next question is: How can I incorporate enough of it into my cooking to make a difference? If I did nothing but Indian/Pakistani type cooking that would be easy, but I don't. In fact close to half the cooking I do is Japanese, and a lot is old-fashioned American or French, and I just don't see turmeric fitting nicely into those dishes. So, if anyone has a clever way to incorporate turmeric into your diet, I'd love to hear about it!

Right now I'm making a dish from Pakistan which, because it has so many different things which are supposed to have anti-viral, immune-boosting, or other good effects, I call my "anti-virus special". Here's the recipe:

Fry a lot of onions in butter in one pan and a lot of bitter melon in butter in another. When onions are soft, mix bitter melons in. Add lots of turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne pepper, salt, chopped fresh garlic, and grated fresh ginger. Add some coconut oil and fry for a few more minutes. Add a can of crushed tomatoes and one or two potatoes chopped into small cubes. Simmer over very low heat for one hour. Remove from heat; stir in some yogurt and the juice of one lemon.

hi,i take hot milk with 1 spoon of turmeric powder and one spoon of honey. It tastes very good apart from cleaning your bowl , helping in warding off cough and cold alongwith building immunity. It is also supposed to anti cancereous. For me , it has worked very well in last one year without adversly impacting viral load.

ANGEL265, that sounds great! Since few of us are likely to add turmeric to our cooking every day, something like that would be a good way to keep getting a regular dose. I wonder if cinammon would go well with it?

I just made some sweet potato cookies and added a spoon of turmeric to the batter. I figured the flavor couldn't hurt and the yellow color might make a nice addition.

Here's a curried apple soup I like to make, from Nourishing Traditions. I made it at a friend's home a few years ago and that person's wooden spoon is still bright yellow!

Chop up two onions and sautee in butter until soft. Add one teaspoon each turmeric, cumin, coriander, and sea salt, and a quarter teaspoon each of cinammon, nutmeg, and cloves. Add six apples, peeled and quartered, and a quart and a half of chicken broth. Simmer until apples are soft. Puree. Add juice of one lemon, and serve with dollops of sour cream.

I would advise you to visit some Indian sites to explore the ways of making Indian cuisines. we even make omlette using salt, chilli , pepper and turmeric apart adding onions, garlic, tomotto called Masala Omlette.we take all foods with turmerics as part of it. you may visit www. khanakhazana.com to learn the ways indian foods are made. khana khazana in Hindi means treasure of food .I hope it will help a lot of forum members to explore Indian food.

Angel, thank you for the information and the link! I always include turmeric in any Indian cooking I do--it tends to be in all the recipes, after all--and now I am trying to incorporate it into other dishes as well. This week a Mexican-style chicken stew, bright red from all the red pepper, has had a yellow tinge as well due to my having added turmeric, which went quite nicely in fact.

I knew that there wouldn't be harm in adding cinnamon; I was just expressing the thought that it might be a nice addition to the taste.

Now here is something remarkable:

A few days ago, for some reason, I started thinking about black pepper. Salt and pepper are the ubiquitous American seasonings, but some years ago I simply stopped using black pepper in my cooking--while enthusiastically embracing just about every other herb and spice, including hot red pepper--and never missed it. I think I may have been turned off to it by a Steak au Poivre that had a bit too much poivre for me, or by someone in a restaurant giving the pepper mill a few too many turns over my salad. I love Filipino food, but the presence of whole peppercorns in liberal amounts is a drawback for me.

So, for whatever reason, a few days ago I was wondering why people liked black pepper, and why I didn't, and whether I was missing anything, gastronomically or nutritionally, by eschewing it as I had been doing. Lo and behold, when I looked it up in Wikipedia, I found the following:

"It has been shown that piperine [substance found in black pepper] can dramatically increase absorption of selenium, vitamin B, beta-carotene and curcumin as well as other nutrients."

In the page on piperine, we get this:

"Notably, piperine may enhance bioavailability of curcumin by 2000% in humans."

Wow! Since, in addition to curcumin, selenium is an important thing to us HIVers, it would seem that those wooden pepper-mills filled with Piper Nigrum should be our friends after all.

What amazes me is that none of the material on turmeric or curcumin which I read when I was first interested in the subject mentioned this; I had to stumble upon it by chance. And that is the way with too many things as well.

So, I promptly began re-integrating black pepper into my cooking, starting with that same Mexican chicken to which I added turmeric. I find I do not mind it at all when I cook it into a dish (actually, with all the cayenne I use, it would be a wonder if I noticed it at all!)

Then, the next day, while shopping, I saw a jar of "turmeric almond butter". It was what the name suggests: almond butter with turmeric stirred in, and also a couple of other spices, including black pepper. It was ridiculously expensive and I think it would have been silly to buy (after all, I could just stir some turmeric into my own almond butter if I wanted) but I was impressed by their having added pepper; that probably wasn't a coincidence.

Hi Nestor, that's very interesting about black pepper's capabilities. It's the first mention of it I've seen, and I've been reading a lot about hiv & nutrition...as you say, kind of surprising its not been a headline before given the selenium link. By the way, I enjoy reading your posts very much, I seem to always finish reading them being a bit hungry and with a new recipe to try!!! I do a bit of Thai food cooking, which has some very nice curries, many using tumeric. Also, some stir fry dishes use young pepper corns (called "prik-tai-on", still green on the stem - - they do evenutally turn black, as I've proved when finding them at the bottom of my fridge months buying!) which can spice up a dish very nicely. I'm going to research to see if the piperine content is there while they are still green, which would be great. Thanks for the great info and recipes! esper